The Polish Who Broke Enigma Before Britain Even Tried

Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski — age 23 — applied pure permutation theory to break the German Enigma cipher in 1932, seven years before the war began. The Polish Cipher Bureau built replica Enigma machines and the 'Bomba' — the first machine designed specifically to break Enigma. On July 25, 1939, just weeks before the German invasion, Polish intelligence secretly handed their Enigma replicas and decryption techniques to British and French intelligence at a meeting in the Kabaty Woods near Warsaw. This set Britain's codebreakers at Bletchley Park back by years. Churchill later told King George VI: 'It was thanks to the Poles that we deciphered Enigma.'